Month: November 2012

What is there to fear from her power of destruction, but fear itself? And promiscuity of vision: isn’t this just a dialectic rupture of the stable surface of fantasizing Unity? (When up above there is Love, Absence and Excess into us.)

For Lilith (and the other devil girls, the three dessert goddesses, the females deprecated by masculine religious revision), I’d say Kali to Adam’s Shiva. And Samael to Shakti’s kiss.

Share this:

Like this:

We generally frown upon the projection of an aspect of yourself onto some thing or someone.

It’s seen as weakness, or a form of paranoia or delusion.

The projective personality probably has problems.

But consider mathematical projection: the data mapping of some aspect of an object onto another object. It happens all the time in mathematics. Is it illusion? Morally incorrect? No, it’s just a function, a projection function.

Share this:

Like this:

That Day shall We set a seal on their mouths. But their hands will speak to us, and their feet bear witness, to all that they did. (36:65)

On the Day when their tongues, their hands, and their feet will bear witness against them as to their actions. (24:24)

On the Day that the enemies of Allah will be gathered together to the Fire, they will be marched in ranks. At length, when they reach the (Fire), their hearing, their sight, and their skins will bear witness against them, as to (all) their deeds. They will say to their skins: “Why bear ye witness against us?” They will say: “(Allah) hath given us speech,- (He) Who giveth speech to everything: He created you for the first time, and unto Him were ye to return.
“Ye did not seek to hide yourselves, lest your hearing, your sight, and your skins should bear witness against you! But ye did think that Allah knew not many of the things that ye used to do!
“But this thought of yours which ye did entertain concerning your Lord, hath brought you to destruction, and (now) have ye become of those utterly lost!”

When Kundalini awakening and Self-Realization has occurred, a flow of energy in the form of cool vibrations starts flowing from the hands. This is what is signified in the above passage. Here Prophet Muhammad is talking of the coming Time – Time of Resurrection – which is in fact the present Age of Aquarius or Kundalini Awakening. Sri Mataji Nirmala Devi

I had a theory regarding the body, skin, speech and judgement. An approximately Kabbalic view, that the feet are the sephirot of Hod and Netzach (martyrdom/annihilation and victory/revelation of the primordial human, known as the diamond dialectic in Tailorism) and the arms are the sephirot of Gevurah and Hesed (logic and love, what Tailorism calls differentiation and unity within the primordial man). I also viewed skin as the skin given to Adam and Eve upon entry (finah) into the world as we know it, the garment/trace of consciousness as it weaves its way across the cycles of incarnation.

I maintain my view of reality still in relation to these concepts – the sephirot, the trace and so on. But I no longer hold the interpretation that the Quran, Muhammed, Sufism or Islam should be read in accord with them. These are Tailorite concepts – we cannot say for certain that they are Muhammedean.

I’m quite interested in the surplus to my interpretation – “proper” Islam’s reading of the verses. I’ve heard Sheikhs say that, because God is all, there really isn’t an “I” – and this is why parts of our anatomy will testify against that “I” – that this judgement is really a deconstruction of the “I”.

If that’s so, the Freudian shift of the metaphor is interesting. In that it supposedly has this esoteric meaning – but actually belies a more sinister body paranoia. The metaphor is given for ostensibly spiritual (anti-ego) purposes, but, ironically, is the very genesis of the ego, whose nature is repression of the body, whose pathology is body paranoia.

What’s the body ever done to the ego? Nothing, the body isn’t out to get “me”. The body loves to love, to eat, to shit, to sleep, to fuck or be fucked. It isn’t out to testify against the ego. That’s the ego’s fantasy, the B grade 50’s horror film of the man who receives a murderer’s hand in a surgical transplant, who’s hand operates with a criminal mind of its own. A fantasy that derives from the Cartesian cogito, the moment at which the ego is formed and says “At least I exist (though the body’s reality is in doubt)”. This formative separation opens a space for paranoia of an “accusing” body.

What’s the alternative to body paranoia for the poor old self? To simply enjoy being in the skin within which it flows, is breathed, is consumed, shat, spoken, fucked.

No limbs going to testify. There’s just the self, living through infinite reincarnation. This is called God, love. Or if we want to retain an Islamic skin of sorts: Arm Leg Leg Arm Head.

Share this:

Like this:

Sacher-Masoch is the vanguard for civilisation, he contributes to progressive spiritual evolution in several aspects.

But his conclusion is not such a contribution.

That woman, as nature has created her, and man at present is educating her, is man’s enemy. She can only be his slave or his despot, but never his companion. This she can become only when she has the same rights as he and is his equal in education and work.

The same rights as he?! Really?

The last sentence is remarkably schoolboyish for the man who gave is S&M. It’s an idealism that turns away from our biological nature, our true nature, grounding any such idle speculation. He should have stopped himself short: she can be his slave or despot, not because of (or despite of) progressive trajectory, some Chardanian omega point … She’s that way because she loves to be that way.

And that’s the way she’s progressed: feminism intertwined with DnA embodiment of the S&M fetish.

Like this:

I’m really slumming it with a critique of — yeugh — an internet secularist intellectual. I really ought to be doing better things with my brain. (I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attacked ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost to the blogosphere, like tears in rain. Time to “comment”.)

A reader sent me this clip — I’m travelling and watched it a few hours ago in my hotel room, after waking up from a jet lagged and troubled sleep.

The speaker makes a few interesting points and the analysis isn’t bad — for an internet intellectual. Back when I was a philosophy teacher, I’d have given it a C+/B-.

He’s incorrect to define all religion as based around a “death denial” fantasy. Despite the fact that there is usually a component of “the afterlife” in all religions, the fantasy of transcending death is not what primarily drives the religious subject, and certainly not what compels one religion to attack another in some game for ideological supremacy. The video is based upon the common atheist fallacy that people are drawn to religion because they fear death, that religion offers the “soul” and “the afterlife” as its central regulating currency of comfort.

Quite the opposite: religions embrace death, religious people do not fear death, they desire it. Because religion is death. Strictly speaking, religions do not offer comfort from death, but the opportunity to decorate the body with the signs of a number of micro-deaths.

What’s a religious system of belief? It’s a sign regime, a system of totems, to be worshipped, totems to regulate and constrain the body. Wear these forms of clothing, because God tells you to. Believe in Angels, because God tells you to. Go to Church on Sunday, because God tells you to. Assert that prophet X is the son of God, because God tells you to. Worship God as a singularity, or God as a Trinity, because God tells you to. Beliefs are embodied, some very obviously, some more subtly: but a belief is worn upon the body like blue wode on the face of a Celt, like a Maori’s tatoo, to demcarate one tribe from another. (Even a complex belief, like the Christian Trinity like the Sufi conception of “fana” or Kabbalic “gilgul”, these are also totems that mark the body of the religious subject.) The body is decmarcated into territories, then potentially into systems, totems are signs that say “The Land of X”.

The “afterlife” is not a generic concept, it varies from religion to religion in quite marked ways. Each vision of an afterlife is another totem, another way of regulating the body of the religious subject.

And what’s a totem then? It’s a micro-death, a small death. A moment at which the subject’s life ceases momentarily. A totem designates a micro black hole in the fabric of life’s continuum. The thing we always want, but can never get. It’s never “held”: it’s always two steps ahead of us. That desired thing, that eternally silent absence: it is death, by definition. Consciousness is life, speaking, continuum — but it is coordinated by the desire for pause, for full stops, for commas, for signs that life be directed through. Life is coordinated by the crystallization of desire for death, by the moments at which life can form itself into a cohesive, regulated, tribal subject: so consciousness can become known as human consciousness.

In my experience of religion, I observe that people give a kind of “lip service” to the afterlife. They will continually assert its existence, and the supremacy of their Prophet/teacher’s model of the soul and its journey after death. But they don’t find comfort in that vision, not in the way an atheist imagines they might. Instead, that particular vision of the afterlife gains its capital the same way other aspects of their religion do. A religious subject will become agitated when someone attacks their vision of the afterlife. But this isn’t because the comfort of that vision is under attack. It’s simply because the totem that demarcates their territory is threatened. Their agitation will take exactly the same form as the agitation they might feel if other totems are attacked (such as dress code, forms of forbidden mimetic art or dietary rules) — arguably they might become more upset over these other totems than the totem of the afterlife, because they have greater value within their particular sign regime.

Because the threat is not to their comfort level, not a threat of the reality of death — the threat is to their particular, religious encapsulation of the desire for that impossible reality. The threat is to the religious desire for death.

Like this:

I’d kind of already given up the fight, by that stage, but was still going through the motions. As a result, it’s a prime example of Islamic Tailorism at its worst, at its most worthless.

If I had deleted the term “Islam” and replaced it with “X”, “True Islam” with “True X”, and “Muhammed” or “Prophecy” with “Y”, then there’d be virtually zero semantic content derivable from the piece’s configuration.

It’s not me wrestling with God, it’s me wrestling with a conflicting set of glossary/vocabularies (mine and the religion’s), with an unpleasant, bigoted and colonial-sounding result.

Whenever anyone embarks on a major piece of software engineering, it’s important to baseline your glossaries, the vocabularies used by participating stakeholders. But beyond that, there’s the actual work around constructing the piece of software, built on top of agreed vocabularies.

The attitude of this piece exemplifies the stunted phase I was going through at the time, in the early stages of my divorce from that religion.